


Forest Family

by pseudofaux



Category: Samurai Love Ballad: PARTY
Genre: F/M, Forest Family Fuma, wingcinna's Fuma saplings, words inspired by art
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-21 14:02:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15559305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pseudofaux/pseuds/pseudofaux
Summary: Kotaro's family lives in the forest, and they are happy there.





	Forest Family

**Author's Note:**

> [wingcinna on tumblr](http://www.wingcinna.tumblr.com) created a series of sketches of Fuma Kotaro and his MC (Cinna's poliosis MC for him, who is PERFECTION) and their children. They were so AFASGKAKFJGAKGJLASJGASJGAKGJ fantastic I could not get them out of my head, and I really wanted to write about their lives to thank Cinna for sharing her vision. Thanks, Cinna!

* * *

  _ **Katakuri | Dog's Tooth Violet** _

_**** _

A little bird is jumping from limb to limb in a tree, motions more flits than hops. The bird chirrups and gurgles and its heart beats _fastfastfast_ as shoulders flex and thin bones unfold to wings and it points its beak to the sky.

“PaaaaaPAAAAAA~!” the little bird sings. Because his father has come home to their forest place. And even the freedom of trees and flitting and flying and singing are not as good to the little bird as being home in his nest with his family. That cozy, loving, togetherness is the very best.

So the little bird launches out and down, legs pushing a tree limb, air buffeting fingers that are relaxed and gleeful, with no thought of fear and every surety of safety. The little bird’s father leaps to catch him with a _whuff_ of sound and the warmest smile the little bird has seen since that morning. His father’s eyes close above a happy mouth, cheeks reaching for the blueness of the sky and strong teeth catching the gleam of the sun.

Their wings around each other are warm, as they fall and bounce to the ground. Strong arms stiffen to keep him from hurt as they land.

“My little shooting sprout,” marvels his father as they lay there catching their breath.

The little bird leans in. “Today, I – I am a flying bird,” he shares in a whisper, eyes wide to invite his father to be a bird, too.

“Ah,” says his father, playing along immediately. His papa is the best. “So you are. Let’s sing your mother a birdsong.”

They do, racing one another to their home. He squawks after his father like a crow and tries to whistle over giggles. He jumps toward the tall, strong back but the man is too quick, so the little bird only hoots, mournfully, gets up, and runs the few steps to the father that has stopped and is waiting for him. He puts his hand into the larger proffered palm where it is always safe and warm, and his father’s fingers squeeze his gently as they walk to their home together. The house is humble but comfortable and full to its corners with affection.

Katakuri has become a little boy again, close to the ground like his namesake, but that is okay. It is great fun to be a bird, but he is eager to eat dinner and tell his mother and sister and brother everything he saw in the trees. His mother does not like it when he goes too high, so he will keep that part to himself. And the flying.

“Daddy,” he whispers, hoping his father will keep his secret.

The man stops walking and looks down him. “Hmm?”

Katakuri-the-boy fidgets. “I went up high.”

His father smiles and then uses his other hand to pull it down into a frown. Katakuri giggles. His papa is the best.

“What did you see when you went up high?” his father asks, carefully neutral.

Katakuri squeezes the hand holding his. “You!”

His father laughs and scoops him up so fast the motion of rising makes him feel like a bird all over again.

“Kaaaa, papa!” he says, with his happiest smile.

“Kaaaa~!” his father imitates, kissing Katakuri’s brow. They mimic bird sounds all the way into the house.

* * *

  ** _Karasu-uri | Snake Gourd_ **

She loves her family so very much. Even her brothers. But they are _noisy_.

She needs quiet, at least a minute of quiet, to center herself so she can focus deeply on all the sounds, hear things rushing and breathing and flowing. That way she can figure out how to respond to the world. What to leave, and what to pounce on. Which plants to weed and which ones to nurture and which ones her mother showed her could season their food and which ones her father showed her could stop a person. For a while or for good.

But she can’t do any of that when her brothers are so noisy. It makes her uncomfortable and it gives her a headache.

“Mama,” she whines, because she is only four and the world seems to be pressing behind her eyes. “My head– the noise–”

“Oh, my sweet,” her mother says, “I’m sorry, my Uri. I know.”

And her mother does know. The youngest Fuma wails, proof in action. She and her mother both wince and turn to the child, trying to figure out what might soothe him.

“Why don’t you go find your father,” her mother gently suggests, “And tell him about your head. He gets headaches, too. He will know how to help you.”

“I can go by myself?” she marvels. Since her brother fell out of a tree the children have been made to stick closer to the house, or allowed on adventures only with one of their parents. Or both, she realizes, remembering their picnic last week, when mother and father took turns sitting with her younger brother and running around after her and Katakuri. Uri and Katakuri, forest children, running as though their roots had come out of the earth, laughing because they were invincible.

Her mother smiles gently and her smooth fingers trace from Uri’s cheek to her chin.

“You are a strong, good girl,” her mother says. “Your father should be by the river. That’s not far. If you shout, one of us will come to you.”

“I won’t shout unless it’s important,” she promises solemnly.

Her mother smiles again. “I know, little sprout.”

She trails her fingers longingly against tree trunks on her way to find her father, but stays mostly on the ground. He is at the river edge and when she tells him about her head, he gently lays his hand on her temple and the world goes quiet enough for her to get her bearings at last. Her father shows her something magic she can do, applying pressure to the base of her thumb and to the back of her neck, and her headache eases further and then goes away altogether. It’s not a nice as having her head in one of her parents’ laps while they stroke her forehead, but it is faster. She is often on the move now and it is good to know a new thing.

Her father looks so happy when she tells him quietly that she thinks it has worked. He scoops her up onto his shoulders and she points out the flashes of scales she can see in the water of the sun-dappled river. It doesn’t hurt her eyes to look, because her head doesn’t hurt any more. He praises her every time, and together they catch dinner.

As she is carried home, her father asks if she remembers how she was named.

“I was born at night.” She says it in a hush, because this story is her blood and bones. It is a ritual to recite this, like the stories of her brothers’ names.

Her father hums, acknowledgment and prompt.

“In early summer when the night was cool. Mama hurt but loved me very much. You caught me and cleaned me, and after I nursed you took me outside to see the moon and we found Karasu-uri blooming.”

“That’s right,” her father says, pleased. “They were beautiful.”

“Mama says they reminded you of the afterbirth.”

He nods. “They look very much alike. Thin petals like veins. I hope you will always bloom and always be protected, Karasu-uri.”

“Me, too,” she whispers, suddenly aware that there is a possibility one day her mother and father may not provide everything that she needs. She thinks over how she will protect herself and the things she loves.

After giving her minutes to think, he asks, gently, “How is your head, quiet bird?” He is so concerned she squeezes her arms around her father’s neck to reassure him.

“Better. Thank you,” she says.

“Should we fly fly fly, then, fast as we can?”

“Yes!” she giggles and squeezes again. He hands her the basket and then flaps his bent arms like wings. Her father’s running is faster than most birds fly, and the afternoon air on her face is as warm as love, as thrilling as finding a magic feather. Brown hair the exact color of her own tickles her cheeks and makes her laugh more, which makes her father laugh, too.

“Uri?” calls her mother from inside the house. The bird girl hears but is too wrapped up in leaning so she can watch her father to answer. When her father hears her mother’s voice, something calm and beautiful happens to his face, the thing that is happening now– his eyes go soft, lashes meeting and parting in the same slow way her parents do. A smile Uri sometimes envies and always loves takes over her father’s happy grin, and she knows that her mother will be smiling soon, when her father rubs his nose against her cheek in greeting. Her brothers will smile, too. Her father’s smile is so beautiful and kind she does not think anyone would ever choose to resist it.

* * *

  ** _Myoga | Ginger_ **

**__ **

Mama is warm and loving, ever-soothing. Papa is warm and loving, ever-soothing. Both sing. Both cuddle. Both rub his back and his tummy to help him sleep. Both let him squeeze his tiny fingers around theirs as he learns where his hands are and how to work them. They clap and cheer for his every squawk. They give him yummy things to try. They call him Myoga, the sounds blending into a comfortable word they make into songs. He’s so loved and safe.

His brother and sister toss and catch him and giggle with him. More than once, brother has wound a long blue scarf around them both, and then runs and runs and runs through the forest, and he shrieks with delight until he falls asleep. More than once, sister has placed her soft hand on his forehead when he hurts, and it makes the hurting go away, like hunger goes away when mama holds him close. He’s so loved, and so safe. He can’t wait to sing with these people that he loves.

But for now he surrenders to sleep and peace, loved and safe, cheek gone flat against papa’s chest, so perfectly warm even his drool feels a little nice. He is surrounded by the smells of his home and family, loved and safe, and there is no better place in the exciting, infinite world.

* * *

 

To be a mother is very different than to be a young woman. But with Kotaro for a husband, she is thoroughly loved. Worshipped, even. Every night that they are together– and he is never apart from them for long– he touches her with reverence in every end of himself, whether he is working her to bliss or simply slotting their fingers together and kissing her brow, murmuring tendernesses or telling her about some marvelous thing one of the children did that day.

Kotaro is not wholly sane, and never will be. But his time with her, and with his children, has given him healthy places to pour his energy and love. He is an astonishingly good father, patient and attentive. Gentle. He encourages and understands his children in a way that keeps pace with her own intuition as their mother, so it is… It’s not _scary_ the way she feared it would be. She knew he would take care of them, trusted in the strength of his love from the beginning because he gave her no reason to ever doubt it. But he has proven himself capable of loving more than her, properly, and it has happened with an easy elegance she would never have expected of him just a few years ago.

When he touches her now, his hands are sure. Kotaro is strong and devoted and passionate, and while their original arrangement may have been unbalanced, it feels even now. They are never hungry and they have taught each other about foraging and kitchen work. Their bodies have learned each other. She thinks their souls have, too. He has learned to ask when he needs help, and he gives her so much of the love she wants it feels natural to give him the help that she can. Letting him squeeze her hand when his head hurts. Letting him sing off-key songs with the chorus of their children.

Because of their children, he does not work for the Hojo anymore, and if the Hojo have ever tried to bring him back into their employ, he has dealt with that problem without letting those people near his forest home. She is grateful for all of that. She left the Takeda with some regret and much regard, never looking back. But the Hojo are different. Cruel. They were exceptionally cruel to Kotaro. That’s part of why this forest place and their lives here have been so calming on him. No one could flourish under the kind of treatment he endured.

She knows he loves the forest. She has come to love it, too, and what they have made there together. Here, just far enough away from a village, his mania mostly manifests in endless willingness to sing to his children and make love to her and gather food and fix whatever has broken. She knew when she met him that there was a sweetness in his soul that could flourish if it were nurtured. And now he is a partner more loving than she ever dreamed _anyone_ could be.

So his hands are sure when they touch her now, and sometimes there is even a dark and beautiful mien about his face when he looks at her, desirous in a way that pulls at her attraction to him and makes her feel desirous right back. It is thrilling. But it is not better or more beautiful than when they come together in gentle light. Simply different. A new layer of their love for one another. And she likes that.

He never, ever boasts, not even in those times when his eyes go hooded when he looks and her and he seems confident in the tension between their bodies and the inevitability of their joining. Perhaps he will never boast. But he no longer calls himself a worm except to be silly for their sons and daughter.

_One chilly afternoon before their first son was born, she turned in the blankets and dreamily asked Kotaro if he had any names in mind. He’d turned to her with the happiest eyes, the golden brown of chestnuts in sunshine. Warm hands on her belly, he confessed he didn’t have any names in mind, but he was thrilled to think of it and set to finding perfect choices. They named Katakuri for the bold, sweet flowers carpeting meadow space near their forest home when he came into the world. Then the same for their daughter and second son, named after plants growing strong when they were born._

There is a whimsy about Kotaro as a father, playful but ethereal, and naming their children after pieces of the forest captures that nicely. She loves him so much.

Watching their children sleep in a happy, healthy tangle, she smiles. They usually settle apart from one another during lullabies and then their little hands seek each other out as they become drowsy. They share their father’s wide scarf, their favorite blanket.

Kotaro is sitting close to them, watching them, too. She settles next to him on the floor and leans to rest her cheek on his shoulder.

* * *

 

Kotaro looks at his sleeping children and is deeply satisfied. His mind is quiet. He doesn’t hurt. His body is filled with love for his family.

His wife sits next to him and rests her head on his shoulder. His arm is around her before he knows it has moved. Around his earthbound heaven-being, who has always seen the soft parts of his soul, even when they were deep-down buried, like a squirrel might save and lose a kernel. Silly fool that he was, both the kernel and the squirrel. She made him grow, out of the ground, soft and strong. Now he feels like a tree, and even if his trunk and limbs are crooked and lightning-jagged, he can shade and shelter and nourish his family. He wants it to grow, but it is so perfect now. She is so perfect now. They are so perfect now.

Kotaro tells her so, and she smiles and tells him he is perfect, too, for them.

Slow but steady as a fruit tree grows, he is coming to believe her.

He pulls her into his lap, where she blushes and smiles, and he tips her chin up so he can brush the words he likes to say against her lips before he kisses her. Sweet-smooth-soft, her lips slide under his, and he is _happy_. Her softness has never wavered, not even when she goes tense when they are one, not even when she is birthing their children. She is soft in her soul, soft enough to cushion and even blunt the parts of himself that he wishes were not so barbed and awful.

And their children. Their children make him feel peculiar about himself, because he loves those three beautiful spirits more than anything in this world, _even though_ he sees little bits of himself in them. They are such clever song-makers. His daughter in particular is danger-bright, but kind. Kind like her mother, and kind like her mother helps him be kind. Her brother Katakuri is playful and precise. Myoga wants nothing more than to be close to his family. They all love like he has loved all along, with their whole hearts.

He really wants another baby. He scoops his wife up and carries her outside, his stomach tightening as she joins her arms around his neck with a quiet giggle of delight. They both know what is coming. How comfortable, to share his life and body with her, and how heaven-splendid, that she shares hers with him.

The moon is not yet full, but soft light, silver white, is covering everything. It is bright enough for moon shadows.

Kotaro lays his wife down in the fragrant grass and tells her her skin is glowing as he undoes the cords keeping her kimono closed. To guide her arms from their sleeves is a fun game because he knows she’ll put them back about his neck when she can.

When she gets fidgety under his caresses and the tickles he knows she loves at the inside of each thigh, just above her knees, he gives her the fingers of one of his hands to suck. His bliss is making her writhe and understand how loved she is, how grateful he is for her affection and patience. For the life she has given him and their family. Her tongue sliding against his fingertips makes him shiver and he has to scold himself to focus.

He trails his other fingers up, up, goes back to her knee, and then trails up, up again. She makes one of those _noises_ around his fingers in her mouth and it is his joy to bend to her. He can almost make out the spill of his hair against her flesh as he kisses the softly gleaming streaks on her stomach, lightest lilac and faintest blue in the night. Then his mouth makes its way to meet his fingers at her sex.

Kotaro feels his wife’s fine teeth on his hand in her mouth, and it’s so sweet he almost cries. Perhaps he does cry. He is too focused on bringing her pleasure to check, and her own salty taste is so similar to tears that if he does cry the evidence is lost when it mixes with her slickness. He feathers a finger over and down her slit a few times before pressing it into her without hurry.

Their children are loved and healthy, and sleep well. If Kotaro and his wife aren’t _too_ noisy, the two of them can have as much fun here as they can stand. He crooks his finger to stroke her magnificently stretchy walls and she pushes herself up at his hand and face. His eyes roll back in his head at the pulse of arousal her body and her trust grant him. He counts himself blessed, or somehow overlooked by the heavens if not favored by them. Mindful of his luck, Kotaro slides the tip of his tongue around his wife’s tenderest spot. Taking care of her this way, making this offering to her of sincere and gentle affection, is one of his most solemn duties.

So he suckles and nibbles and licks at her, and works his fingers along her sex and her tongue and her lips. He makes her come twice, relishing her sighs and moans and especially those delicious little gasps and the way their eyes connect over her body. Then he kisses the swollen part of her he’s worked with so much adoration, and leaves it to kiss up her belly like the greedy thing he is, refreshing the love mark on the underside of each of her breasts. One of their secrets. He loves having secrets with her. He laves up the curve of her to one nipple while his wet fingers slide around the other before he puts them in her mouth and she draws at them like she tastes better on his skin, like _she_ needs _him_ – what a marvelous play this is.

When his face is above hers and she is looking at him with eyes the equal of her skin, he asks quietly, “Do you want another baby?”

She smiles and says she wants _him_. And oh, his silly heart, it clenches like his ribs have turned inward, it hurts but it is the sweetest ache and he would gladly live with it always.

“ _I_ want another baby,” he tells her, truth coming out as something playful while he nuzzles at her cheeks.

“Hmm,” she says, but he knows– he knows, because she is smiling that quiet fox smile– she’s not thinking, not really. He smiles wide because he is widely happy, wide enough to cover the whole forest, and he fits himself into her and watches as her lips tremble around a sigh of his name. The slide is slow and strong. It is perfect enough to make them both groan, a deep and natural guttural harmony that delights him to his toes, clenching at the grass. When he can go no further into her, his belly touches hers and he grinds himself against her, holding one of her hands and her hip and murmuring that she is the loveliest of miracles, glowing and graceful, a willow of a person. She brushes the backs of her free fingers against his cheek as gentle as breeze and he pushes toward her hand like a cat.

Kotaro stretches his thumb in from her hip and presses his shaft just before where it joins her body–it makes them both shiver and he loves it– before stroking down to brush the spot that makes her sing truest.

He makes love to his wife on the soft floor of the forest, and thinks that her weary, pleasured face deserves to be wreathed with flowers that speak of his devotion to her. But she is more beautiful than any bloom, and no flower language can give voice to the depth of his feeling. So he holds her, instead, hands moving to gently cage her face as he stares at her, hungry for every detail of her expressions.

She struggles to say his name and affection bubbles out of him as laughter as he pumps his hips toward hers all the faster, glad of her clothing below her body on the grass. He doesn’t ever, ever want to hurt her.

“I love you,” he tells her, again, always, and he hears the familiar frantic note in his voice but he doesn’t fear, and good, brave, loving wife that she is, he does not think she fears, either. Her whimpered reply to his sentiments does not sound scared. It sounds pleasured, and the note of it, and her tightly-shut eyes, and the way she squeezes around him all make him come in her with a cry that is soft, surprised, and grateful.

He takes her to the summer-warm river and lays her on the shore so the water can brush over the beauty of her ankles as he cleans her up. She is so tired she lets him carry her on his back to their home, and he tucks away a thought of doing this again sometime soon. The way she presses against him is very nice, and her arms about his shoulders make him calm.

“Another baby,” she purrs, sleep sweet, at his ear. Her breath is warm and her words make him hard enough that he fucks her again, slowly, when they settle in their room. She feels magnificent and her constant shivers give him a tingly pride that teases his release from him. The whole experience is like being caressed.

And then they rest, wrapped in one another. So safe. So loved.

He hears the forest’s nighttime song as he drifts off. Together with her breathing, it gives him a peace at least as deep as his deepest sorrow. His last thought is that the moon must be in his blood, to keep him awake when everyone he loves sleeps so well.

**Author's Note:**

> The plants the saplings are named after all grow in Japan, and to the best of my knowledge they are native/would have been around in the Sengoku and after. I checked growth/bloom cycles to match up with seasonal mentions of when Katakuri was in utero and Karasu-uri was born. NERD OUT ABOUT PLANTS TO ME ANY TIME. :D


End file.
